A Salvation Army senior officer says that a confessed child sex offender was allowed to continue working at a women and children’s shelter, despite clear policy against such a retention. Salvation

Army Commissioner James Condon has given evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse concerning Major Colin Haggar. who admitted in to indecently assaulting an eight-year-old girl in a town in central western NSW in 1989.

In 1990, Major Haggar told Commissioner Condon he wanted to go to the police and confess

The royal commission heard that Major Haggar was stood down the following year, but the town where the abuse occurred and other Salvationists were not told what happened.

Although the organisation had dismissed Major Haggar, no-one from the Salvation Army had notified the police.

Commissioner Condon said it did not occur to him to make any notes of the report, or to tell anyone in the Salvation Army that Major Haggar had gone to police.

Major Haggar faced no charges and was reinstated as an officer in 1993.

When his wife Kerry Haggar was promoted to the church’s executive, Colin Haggar was promoted alongside her, according to the rules of the organisation.

Commissioner Condon says he wrote to the leadership in London appealing against the move, but was told that Kerry Haggar could not be promoted alone.

In 2007 the Salvation Army issued a minute saying no-one who was convicted or cautioned for a sex offence could be considered as an officer of the Salvation Army.

However, the minute did not apply to Major Haggar.

In April 2013, after the royal commission was declared, at Commissioner Condon’s request a message was sent out to all Salvation Army corps requesting them to report any historical child sexual abuse.

By then, Major Haggar was in charge of a shelter for women and children. Commissioner Condon said he decided to retire Major Haggar from his position as an active officer of the Salvation Army in October last year.

Major Colin Haggar retains his rank and the right to wear a Salvation Army uniform.

A man wanted for questioning over the Brisbane murder of French student Sophie Collombet has been arrested in the New South Wales town of Coffs Harbour.

Police last week named Andrew Milward as a person of interest in the 21-year-old’s murder. He was spotted on security vision near Kurilpa Park about the time of the killing. Ms Collombet’s naked body was found in a rotunda at the park, near the William Jolly Bridge and CBD, on March 28.

An agent that inhibits mitochondrial division can overcome tumor cell resistance to a commonly used cancer drug, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute have found.

The research also showed that the combination of the two induces rapid and synergistic cell death.

Separately, neither had an effect. These findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2014.

“In our earlier work, we found that blocking production of a protein called Drp1 stopped mitochondria, known as the powerhouses of the cell, from undergoing fission, which is necessary for the cellular division process called mitosis,” said Bennett Van Houten, Ph.D leader of UPCI’s Molecular and Cell Biology Program.

“The loss of this critical mitochondrial protein caused the cells to arrest in mitosis and to develop chromosomal errors, and eventually led the tumor cell into the cell death pathway known as apoptosis.”

The researchers blocked Drp1 in breast cancer cell lines with an agent called mitochondrial division inhibitor-1 (mdivi-1) and found that when mdivi-1 and the cancer drug cisplatin were given together, they caused DNA damage, DNA replication stress, and greater than expected apoptosis rates.

The synergistic drug combination acted through two independent biochemical pathways that caused the mitochondrial membrane to swell, increasing its permeability and allowing the leak of chemical signals that trigger apoptosis.

“Cisplatin is one of the most widely used cancer drugs today, but some tumors are inherently resistant to it, and many others become resistant, leading to treatment failure,” Dr. Van Houten said.